


the first wound (of many)

by Gildedstorm



Category: Sundered (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, ask your dubious sentient rock weapon today, tfw the eldritch crystal manipulating u is ur only support system, the inherent trauma of in-universe respawning, what will you give up for the sake of freedom from an unending nightmare?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22216939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gildedstorm/pseuds/Gildedstorm
Summary: What is death when it does not bring an ending? A prison; a trap; a nightmare. What is freedom then? What is it worth?Eshe finds out.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	the first wound (of many)

**Author's Note:**

> it turns out I have a Thing for affable yet terrible entities making doomed bargains with the desperate, and this is only news to me
> 
> sundered has been taking up much of my time lately, and I love it

In the caverns, Eshe dies.

She dies crushed beneath the weight of monsters. She dies riddled with burns, with lightning tearing through every muscle and nerve, to a blade singing with energy as it cleaves through her.

She dies, and wakes to the smell of her own cooked flesh. To the nightmare ache of whatever killed her last. To the terribly dead air, and the faint shimmer of the smoke from the Sanctuary’s candles and always, always, to the crystal tugging at her.

_Come, Eshe. Again. Do you not wish to see a true sky once more?_

Of course she does. Of course. So she swallows down her bile and goes down into those wild, shifting spaces again and again and again.

At first, she tries to use the crystal like a dagger. (It gleams wetly like blood when it speaks.) It has little patience for her slow and clumsy attempts, and it begins to yank at her wrist as it unspools into deadly light. It is easier to fight when she stops trying to lead. She only has to think _strike_ and it does, flashing from whip to blade to impossible spikes. It pulls her along with it, nudging her body into the right forms until they flow in sync.

Many deaths later, it is effortless.

Is it her instrument and weapon, or has she become it instead? Pointless to ask that, or risk thinking about it for too long. The crystal’s weight is a comfort in her hand. Its voice is the only one she hears. She does not live long, but without it she would not live at all.

She dozes in the Sanctuary sometimes, and hears the crystal’s harsh whisper of her name. She thinks on how this is the only place of safety, where the jaws of the trap loosen enough that she does not feel their bite. There is a truth there that should matter, but she is cornered and forever wounded and all she can care about is the chance to breathe between one dying and the next.

What question or dream brought her here to begin with? She can no longer remember. She must have been searching for something. It must have mattered once, too.

But even with the crystal, she dies. She is too frail, too slow, too easily overwhelmed. The Valkyries’ tools are many and wondrous and still not enough to save her.

_Flesh is soft,_ the crystal tells her as she drags herself to a shrine, side numb to the bone from laser burn. _The Valkyries wrapped themselves in_ _unyielding metal to hide it. My people knew better. What good is a metal cage? What is soft can grow, and be reshaped._

Its voice is a grating murmur. The words should horrify her, but she is already so full of horror.

_Allow my power to reshape you. Let me show you what you can become._

The shrine boils over with light as she approaches, crystal in one hand and the shard of power in the other. Each step is harder than the last, between the emptiness of her wounds and the shard growing cold and colder until she cannot think of loosening her grip. Her vision skews oddly – or perhaps that is the world, cast in layers and shadows by the crystal’s steady glow. It grows brighter, but only seems to bring more darkness with it, until the shrine’s seething energy is as murky as ink.

Just looking at it makes her eyes ache like a bruise. Every visceral instinct that kept her alive in the world beyond is adamant on not letting it touch her, on casting the shard aside and running as far and fast as she can.

But there’s nowhere she can run to without dying, and death will just bring her back to make this journey again. Her hand is a frozen claw, and if she were to stop now, maybe the crystal would simply yank at her legs and take that last wavering step for her.

Would it matter if it did? She wants to think that it makes a difference, to be a pawn but not a puppet, but maybe this place has eroded that distinction. Just as it gnaws at everything else. Her memory, her will, her life.

Eshe takes the step, and the shard tears itself from her grasp. The no-longer-light surges. It bears her up like a wave, and like a wave she drowns in it. Power presses down on her and stretches out against her in every direction at once, and she is transfixed, choking, aware of how brittle she is, how riddled with flaws and afraid that one will prove too much and she will just _shatter_ –

The shrine’s energy ebbs away, leaving her there. It takes her a moment to realize that the air is just air again, a moment longer to realize she should be falling.

The horrific ache of the reshaping is gone, and there is only a regular pain instead, the discomfort of muscles taking on a new task. Her arms spread out, and her cloak spreads with them, splitting into the blurred outlines of wings. _Wings_ , like a childhood dream.

Or a nightmare. There is something wrong with the rest of her, though she cannot see what through the darkness now clinging to her like a shroud. The set of her jaw is different. There are too many teeth in her mouth, and they are sharp.

Slowly, lightly, she drifts down to the ground. The moment her feet touch it the change sweeps through again, a shudder of muscle and bone settling in, and she is herself. Still fragile, still wounded. As trapped as before.

_The shrine was for a small thing, and so it is a small power,_ the crystal says. _You will need more than this to escape._ Its tone is satisfied, encouraging.

_But it is a start._

The journey back to the Sanctuary is long. She thinks about if she’ll die on the way, after struggling to make it so far down. (Would it be a mercy?)

She thinks about being nearly torn apart at the next shrine, and another after that. However many it takes. ( _It will be easier in time,_ the crystal says, smug in its reassurance. _We are attuned now._ )

She thinks about that single weightless moment of not falling. (It had tasted of hope.)

The change is worrying, and then it isn’t. At first she looks for signs that it lingers, that her body is becoming inhuman without her knowledge – have her fingers become talons? Do her teeth fit strangely? – but each time the crystal seems to keep its word. Eventually it seems pointless to waste time and energy on such a fear. Either it will happen, or it won’t, and there is nothing for her but to keep going.

So she does, endlessly.

Time bleeds away from her, impossible to keep track of between deaths and in the dim, unchanging light. The caverns jump around behind her back, and few things are ever in the same place. Perhaps it is the same with time – maybe this day is one she has relived a thousand times, or is years before she was born, or a century after the sandstorm pulled her down.

She does not ask the crystal about it. It would not be a kindness to know.

The wings prove to be enough to survive longer, and reach more. The Valkyries left weapons behind, fearsome ones not meant for anything short of a soldier, but she has always been good at getting abandoned, rusting tools to work for her. The cannon is no different for all that it is pristine and hungry for violence and ammunition both.

With it she claws her way to the prison where Krurhal Milarh is kept. She would have known it even without the layered and wasteful grids of lasers meant to keep rescuers at bay. Every step on the way has had an echo, like a distant heart beating in time with her own. Now that she is close, the air feels cold and charged, and the echo is thunder she cannot quite hear.

There is power beyond the barred and sealed doors, and it is waiting for her. The sense of it lies thick on her tongue and pools behind her eyes. It is repellent, but beneath the dull horror – which has never left her, she is just as accustomed to it as she is to the crystal, and the dying – is something warm, greedy, almost alien.

Kinship, maybe.

She opens the doors.

In the caverns, Eshe dies. But not for much longer.


End file.
